DOC NYC, New York’s first all-documentary festival whose inaugural edition ran from November 3 to 9, announced its award winners on Sunday evening, November 7th, following the Festival's gala screening of TABLOID, the newest film by Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Prizes were awarded by juries in both the “Viewfinders” and “Metropolis” sections, with festival audiences also selecting...
New York has always had an abundance of film festivals....some grand, some intimate; some broad, some specialized; some populist and some elitist. The city's major film institutions, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Anthology Film Archives, present on-going film series that bring a new mini-festival to film buffs every week of the year. The city's other great film resources, including the Film Forum and the IFC Center,...
What is it about French actresses, that they grow even more beautiful and, arguably, more talented with age. Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve are but two examples of this gorgeous gallic phenomenon, where their later roles take on even greater gravitas as the subtle lines of their face change, their voices lowers a register and their once all-too-fragile beauty slightly hardens and becomes as enduring as a Greek sculpture. But blood courses through their veins and passion, if not only...
In CARLOS, the riveting and expansive 5 1/2-hour biopic of the charismatic 1970s terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, writer/director Olivier Assayas relies on a dizzying cinematic style that is also punctuated by the punk music that characterized the rebellion of the age in which he lived. Music and visuals are among the many pallettes that Assayas has used with great fidelity and skill throughout his diverse and diverting 25-year career. As an added panache to the theatrical release o...
The Chilean director Pablo Larrain has become one of the true unique voices in contemporary Latin American cinema. In 2008, his ambitious debut TONY MANERO debuted at the New York Film Festival and became an international hit on the film festival circuit. Adopting the name of the lead character played by John Travolta in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, the film told a darkly comic tale of a serial killer in the turbulent 1970s who is obsessed with the musical film and enters a look-alike contes...
STRANGER THINGS (Eleanor Burke and Ron Eyal, US/UK)
The Woodstock Film Festival, hailed as the most fiercely independent of regional events, wrapped its 11th edition this weekend with the Maverick Awards Ceremony that honored films and filmmakers in competition, as well as bestowing achievement awards to a diverse group of film luminaries. The sparkling event was held on Saturday evening at the historic Backstage Studio Productions Arts & Entertainment Co...
As you walk along the Main Street of Woodstock, New York, it is often hard to tell which decade you are in. Peace signs, hippie clothing and psychedelic posters dominate the storefronts and the streets are filled with women with impossibly frizzy hair and men still wearing plaid shirts and bellbottom jeans. The music that spills out of the street is more 1960s rock than current urban hip hop…..in short, the spirit of dissidence, individuality and questioning of the institution...
Woodstock, New York, nestled in the majestic Catskill Mountains about 100 miles of New York, has a unique perspective on “a New York state of mind”. Close enough to New York City to its south to be influenced by its multi-culturalism and razor-sharp analysis of everything from fashion to publishing to politics to Wall Street, it has also been a haven for ex-pat New Yorkers who burned out from the impossibly fast pace of the city and found an inspiring solace in the bucolic ...
With documentaries showing considerable muscle at the box office, the New York Film Festival is highlighting some documentary films that will be the subject of discussion for months to come. Opening in theaters later this week but featured first at the Festival is INSIDE JOB, a blistering look at the worldwide economic crisis and the secrets and lies that have brought free market capitalism to the brink of disaster.
Tackling a very New York subject, the tension between developm...
Running parallel to the stellar film program of this year's New York Film Festival is a finely curated retrospective series of films from Japanese director Masahiro Shinoda. This prominent director of the Japanese New Wave was fascinated by traditional Japanese aesthetics and the modernity of cinema (and of the transformed Japan of the 1960s, when he started his film career, through to the present). Shinoda's movies detail the spiritual emptiness of post-war Japanese life and search f...
As the worldwide economic crisis sputters into its third year, a new US documentary film attempts to illuminate how we got here. INSIDE JOB, an insightful investigation into the behind-the-scenes machinations and the in-the-headlines posturing that brought capitalism to its most challenging brink since the Great Depression.
With the meticulous, comprehensive and penetrating style that he used to investigate the Iraq war, the award-winning NO END IN SIGHT, director Craig Ferguson...
You maybe have heard of Woodstock.....the pastoral country town, not just the famed music festival. For those in the know, the two should not be confused, since the seminal 1969 music concert happened nearly 50 miles away. But the spirit of those times lives on in Woodstock, New York, where films fill the screen, music rocks the clubs and, oh yes, pot smoke (still) is in the air. Tie-dye still reigns in this Catskills bohemia, and each year the hippies (now entering menopause) joi...
The revolution in Romanian cinema that began several years ago with the astonishingly original films THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (2005), 12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST (2006) and 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (2007), continues to flex its muscle, with a strong showing at the New York Film Festival, which opened this past weekend.
Three extraordinary films from Romania will be featured at the Festival, New York's most prestigious film event. AURORA, the latest effort from director Cristi Puiu...
Future generations will be in a better position to determine whether the introduction of social networking technology in the first decade of the 20th century was a blessing or a curse. Certainly for the entrepreneurs who created new ways for us to communicate with one another, it has been both. Such is the case for the multi-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, who founded the internet phenomenon Facebook, but who has lost as much as he has gained in terms of the trust and love of his friends...
Independent Film Week, a multi-layered program of screenings, conferences, co-production networking events and filmmaker pitch sessions has kicked off the New York film season with a vengeance. Under the auspices of the Independent Feature Project (IFP), the venerable filmmakers organization, this year's event involves both professionals and film buffs in a dizzying schedule of activities around the city of New York from September 19 to 23.
The Independent Film Week kicked off w...
Eugene Hernandez, the highly respected and well liked Founder and Editor-in-Chief of indieWIRE is leaving the leading news, information, and networking site to take on what he describes as “a dream job” as Director of Digital Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Hernandez founded indieWIRE in 1996, and has been Editor-in-Chief throughout the site’s near 15-year history. He will leave his current position October 29th, but maintain ties to indieWIRE as a...
(A LETTER TO UNCLE BONMEE, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
September is only 9 days old, and already the pace of the worldwide film scene is in high gear. As the Venice International Film Festival goes into its final weekend, the excitement is just starting today at the Toronto International Film Festival. Add to that an excellent regional event on the lux island of Martha's Vineyard in Cape Cod, the Martha's Vineyard International Film Festival (www.mvfilmsociety.org), a...
French bad boy actor Romain Duris will be feted on screen for three Wednesdays starting tonight, as the BAMcinematek, one of New York's most adventurous arthouse cinemas, explores the work of one of Europe’s most popular young actors. Already a major star in his native France, Duris is building on that status in America with the upcoming stateside release of his newest hit, Pascal Chaumeil’s romantic comedy, HEARTBREAKER.
The series begins this evening with the stro...
What do women want? It is a question for the ages….and one usually, asked and even answered by men. However, a rare feminine point of view of this ageless subject is on display in the new feature film CAIRO TIME, written and directed by Ruba Nadda and starring the gloriously talented Patricia Clarkson. The film is currently in theatrical release in North America via specialty distributor IFC Films. To view the trailer, log on to: http://pro.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi4120...
Hard as it is to believe, the summer of 2010 (the hottest on record.....thank you global warming) is coming to an end. The cranking of the film industry's engines begin in earnest in September with the Venice,, Montreal, Toronto, New York and San Sebastian film festivals.....but for the last two weeks of summer, we still can relax with the languid and liquid films of French filmmaker Eric Rohmer.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York is offering a complete retrospective of...
Even if you don't know his name, you probably know his imagery. The streetwise graffiti, the charismatic iconography, the madcap use of words and visuals from pop culture.....the coolness of the work and the indelible signature of a gifted, natural (as opposed to heavily trained) artist. And add one more romantic detail.....death at the tender age of 27 after a blazing career that now sees his doodlings capturing record prices on the art auction market. Like James Dean before him, ...
THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED
You've heard of the Warner brothers and the Baldwin brothers.....well, make way for the Safdie brothers, the directorial team of Benny and Josh Safdie, American indie's dynamic duo. The BAMcinématek located at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York has turned the asylum over to the inmates for the eclectic film series titled Emotional Sloppy Manic Cinema: Films Directed and Selected by Benny and Josh Safdie.
The series, a collection of 19...
Richard Linklater, the American indie cult director behind such hits as SLACKER, DAZED AND CONFUSED, BEFORE SUNRISE and last year's ME AND ORSON WELLES, has announced that his next project will be the dark comedy BERNIE.
Jack Black, who starred in Linklater's audience pleaser SCHOOL OF ROCK, is onboard again for the film, which also co-stars cinema icon Shirley MacLaine. BERNIE is set in the small town of Carthage, Texas and follows a
Renaissance man-community leader-morticia...
The summer film season in North America is usually filled with a mix of Hollywood big budget special-effects epics or low-brow buddy comedies. Despite the impressive box office take of such SFX films as INCEPTION and SALT (and the latest in the vampires-are-people-too franchise THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE), this summer has also been marked by various big budget duds like the Tom Cruise-actioner KNIGHT AND DAY, the M. Night Shymalan mystical mess THE LAST AIRBENDER and the Nicolas Cage-tr...
There are a few film directors whose appeal splits people right down the middle. Some hate the work and some are devoted groupies. However, if the response to a particular director bridges the entire spectrum, then it is all the proof needed that this talented film artist's sensibility cannot be ignored. For myself, always a sucker for the sweeping operatic gesture in film, I find myself to be a disciple of the British director Ken Russell.
Russell did not think small in hi...
